Not So Marvel(ous): Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Brand new 64 inch 3D television...check. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D....check. Disappointment...check and double check!

Joss Whedon’s most recent attempt to see a television series survive beyond a handful of episodes is also the latest to come from the Marvel franchise. With the success of his blockbuster Avengers film, he seems to have been given the freedom to do whatever he wants – forever! And who could blame Marvel? The Avengers was well rad!

Sadly though, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. misses the mark on many levels.

A pilot episode is supposed to give you a taste of what’s to come and it needs to be punchy to suck you in. A good pilot is one that introduces you to the context you’ll need later in the series, but does so without the audience being aware that they’re effectively being taken on a guided tour.

Unfortunately, this is not that pilot. I don’t know if Whedon banked on it being green-lit anyway because hell it’s Marvel, but that is no excuse. The story is dull and passes slowly while archetypical characters are ham-fistedly thrown into the fray. The dialogue, which is usually Whedon’s strength, is unnatural, while the casting made me feel as though I was watching S Club 7 solve mysteries.

Has this been any other show’s pilot it would never have been green-lit. Well, maybe on SyFy.

The cast is young, Hollywood, and flat. I understand that Marvel only casts the very attractive for its heroes – they are a collection of rich philanthropists, übermenschen and gods – so it’s understandable that they’d cast men carved from marble, but applying the same approach to the rest of the humble bureaucracy seems a little excessive and fantastic. What I’m saying is that I couldn’t get a job at S.H.I.E.L.D., but I could have gotten a job on the Battlestar Galactica – that place was filled with normal looking people! S.H.I.E.L.D. is a large organisation that has access to some of the most brilliant minds in the world, with near unlimited resources, so you’d think there would be at least one Doc Cottle, Galen Tyrol, or hell, even a Gaius Baltar running around somewhere in an out of focus establishing shot!

The characters, thus far, are cookie cutter stereotypes that seem to be dusty off-the-shelf Whedonverse efforts transplanted into the Marvel universe, which could very well be fine but for the fact that the wit and banter we’ve come to expect from Whedonesque dialogue is just not there. Instead it feels, at best, phoned in. In particular, the kinship between the UK import tech team members is laboured and corny with them contributing nothing but accents and technobabble while looking both attractive and nerdy in non-threatening ways. And I can only hope that the team leader, who has a troubled but relatively stock standard past, will eventually be given a greater role than just ‘driving the bus’. And of course, there’s the quirky hacker who, for some reason, is not arrested for treason, and whose main talents appear to be being ‘bubbly and goofy’ but ‘also warm, edgy and witty’. Because, of course.

The action man field agent is quite possibly the most passable character, but only because he could be any secret agent from any applicable television show ever made. But the worst part, and it pains me to say it, is Agent Coulson. Clark Gregg is not a leading man and given Coulson's origin is as a supporting character, he has no sense of authority. You can’t have a character with a coy smile making jokes and then attempting to yell at someone. I love the film Coulson because he adds a sense of humanity and bewilderment in the superhero world, but here, without the support of the fantasy he is wasted.

Now, as this is my opinion on the pilot some have taken the time to remind me that all of Whedon’s pilots are like this and that I need to reserve my judgement. Honestly though, if he hasn’t gotten the hang of writing decent pilots by now, maybe he needs to reassess the process. Firefly was solid because it planted you right in the middle of a universe with no option but to accept the circumstances within which you found yourself. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is not Firefly, and it even had the benefit of a head start!

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - 7.30pm Wednesdays on Seven.

-Paul Briske